Scythe Ninja 3 CPU Cooler: The Legend Returns?. Page 4

After a pretty lengthy break the Japanese Ninja cooler comes before us in its third reincarnation. We are also going to talk about other two new cooling solutions from Scythe: Rasetsu and Mugen 2 Rev B.

Technical Specifications and Recommended Pricing

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Testbed and Methods

Since it was extremely hot outside and we also had a top cooler participating in our today’s test session, we ran all tests inside a system case with a removed side panel. here is our testbed configuration:

Keeping in mind very high ambient temperature, processor overclocking was limited by the least efficient cooler of our today’s testing participants in its quiet mode. As a result, we managed to overclock our six-core processor (with protuberant heat-spreader) with the multiplier set at 25x and “Load-Line Calibration” enabled to 4.2 GHz. The nominal processor Vcore was increased to 1.34375 V in the mainboard BIOS:

Turbo Boost and Hyper-Threading technologies were disabled during our test session. The memory voltage was at 1.64 V and its frequency was 1.68 GHz (8-8-8-16_1T timings). All other parameters available in the mainboard BIOS and related to CPU or memory overclocking remained unchanged.

All tests were performed under Windows 7 Ultimate x64 operating system. We used the following software during our test session:

The CPU was loaded with two consecutive Linpack test runs with the settings as indicated above. The stabilization period for the CPU temperature between the two test cycles was about 8-10 minutes. We took the maximum temperature of the hottest CPU core for the results charts. Moreover, we will also provide a table with the temperature readings for all cores including their average values. The ambient temperature was checked next to the system case with an electronic thermometer with 0.1 °C precision that allows monitoring the temperature changes over the past 6 hours. The room temperature during our test session varied between the annoying 30.6-31.1 °C.

The three new coolers will be compared against the recently reviewed Scythe Yasya:

We are also going to include the results for ThermoLab Baram-2010, because this is one of the best coolers of the same type and structure:

All tower coolers were tested with one and two fans Slip Stream 120 Adjustable PWM (SY1225SL12HPVC) fans at 800, 1200 and 1900 RPM. Scythe Rasetsu cooler was only tested with one fan, but in the same speed modes. Here I would like to point out that on Scythe coolers Slip Stream fans are just as good as Thermalright TR-FDB fans we normally use, which is however, not true for the other manufacturers’ cooling products.